New content from Gov sources?

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tangor

11:55 am on Dec 22, 2011 (gmt 0)

All publicly-funded research data should be made freely accessible to benefit business and society, the government has said.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) said making the information freely available would help stimulate economic growth, innovation and entrepreneurism, and improve public sector transparency.

"The government, in line with our overarching commitment to transparency and open data, is committed to ensuring that publicly-funded research should be accessible free of charge," a BIS report into Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth said.

"Free and open access to taxpayer-funded research offers significant social and economic benefits by spreading knowledge, raising the prestige of UK research and encouraging technology transfer," it said. "At the moment, such research is often difficult to find and expensive to access. This can defeat the original purpose of taxpayer-funded academic research and limits understanding and innovation."

Jonesy

jimbeetle

Basically only work produced by Federal government employees, usually not works produced by outside institutions that might have been government funded.

And it also only applies to the Federal government. States and muncipalities play by their own rules, some following the Fed policy, some retaining copyight.

lucy24

12:28 am on Dec 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

It's not about who paid for it or who did the work, it's who holds the copyright. In the US, Federal = no copyright. But, just to confuse everyone, work published in the US earlier than I-forget-the-date (1989? 1964? 1980?) falls under the "without copyright notice" rule. And state governments, including many state universities, tended to either forget or deliberately omit a copyright notice. This leads to a lot of confusion.

Does the UK currently work under something similar to Canada's system, where Crown* copyright expires after a flat 50 years?